Taking Another Stab: SCREAM VI

Scream VI works on two levels, as befits an entry in this series of slasher meta-commentaries. The first is as a bloody mystery, a cast slashed to gory bits one by one as a way of ruling out suspects until a grand splattery finale reveals all. The second is slyer, as a movie about characters who are really tired of being in this series. When Jenna Ortega, a survivor from the last one, turns to her sister (Melissa Barrera), a fellow carryover from 5, to fatalistically ask when, or if, she can simply be a normal person again, I felt that exhausted sadness. She’s over it. Later, a victim bleeding profusely from the abdomen will turn to look practically straight down the camera and mutter, “fuck this franchise.” Oh, not this one, per se. In the world of the Screams, their real slaughters have been regularly turned into the series-within-the-series of Stab movies. Its a neat ouroboros, sometimes too neatly fan-flattering, here turned into something like a lament. The movie’s world is ever more full of costumes and posters, having thoroughly commodified the traumas our characters drag around with them. Talk about intrusive thoughts. Their whole world is intrusive, and this movie is sharp enough to realize, in our modern moment, the internet facilitates that. It hasn’t just made pop culture fandoms louder; it’s made true crime and conspiracy theories part of them, and a form of social currency among the know-nothings who flatter themselves amateur truth-tellers. It’s its own brand of hell those caught in the center of tragedy can’t escape.

Here’s a movie about survivors threatened once again by the Ghostface Killer, this time in New York City, with yet another villain’s elaborate plot to draw blood from the old familiar tropes. They’re menaced by the ghost of sequels present. It’s tense and twisty and violent and funny, and well-paced, balanced, and framed. It stands comfortably with the best of the series, albeit without the late Wes Craven’s human touch balancing mean-spirited cleverness with genuine feelings for its victims. Still, this one’s very best moments—of tender connection, of honest emotion, of sisterly bonding or genuine first-blushes of romance—hook into a similar place. Returning directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick redeem the worst routine dissatisfying notes of their previous attempt at sequalizing the once-dormant franchise by using this effort to turn their newer characters from stock repeats into something closer to understandable individuals. (Even the legacy characters who appear (namely Courtney Cox and Hayden Panettiere) and the fresh faces (Dermot Mulroney, Liana Liberato, and Jack Champion) step into something closer to believable focus akin to the series’ Craven efforts.) The movie runs them back through the machinery of its punishing plot, and wrings enjoyment out of it, even as it sees the whole slasher cycle as a curse its characters are doomed to relive every few years until the box office appetite for these cools off again.

No Scare in Sight: INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 3

Ghosts are always operating out of the same playbook. You can’t see a movie haunting without some aggrieved spirit’s paranormal activity following a familiar pattern. First, small objects are unaccountably rearranged. Then there are strange noises – thumps, voices, bells, and whispers – though it rarely comes right out and say what it wants. Finally, the ghost makes a move towards its real aim: an abduction, a possession, a curse, and so on and so forth and what have you. Do the freshly deceased attend some sort of haunting seminar? Maybe there’s mandatory accomplishing-unfinished-business training? Is there an application to become an accredited poltergeist? Because heaven forbid some grabby ghost just snatches a soul willy-nilly without going through the proper steps. There’s apparently a clear process to follow.

There was plenty of time to think about such things while watching Insidious: Chapter 3. I had to do something to pass the time. Most horror movies, even the bad ones, can kick up enough general unease or sprinkle in enough jump scares to keep me alert. But this one, the second sequel to what was a clever and effective spin on the haunted house subgenre, is dull. It didn’t scare me. It not only won’t trouble my sleep, it almost put me to sleep. I could feel a nap tugging at the edges of my attention. But I stayed awake, even though its loudest jolt is right before the end credits, a good way to make sure a dozing audience wakes up in time to exit the theater.

Chapter 3 is technically a prequel, finding Lin Shaye’s psychic character a few years before the events of the first two Insidious chapters. (If you think 3 will do a lot of foreshadowing with regards to her fate in the other entries, you would be correct.) Shaye, a longtime character actress, does well with a lead role, playing a character with grandmotherly feeling about her, but she’s also weary and sad from all the ghosts she’s had to communicate with over the years. She’s a terrific presence, but the movie proceeds to let her down. Her character’s prior terrific mysteriousness is laboriously explained away. And despite what feels like constant paranormal assaults, there’s never much in the way of a good disquieting rattle to match her weariness. It’s all rather superfluous, unless you’re really curious to see how she met her goofy assistants.

The scenario isn’t as intriguing as either the original or its lesser sequel. Proving all you need to make a horror movie is a girl and a ghost, Chapter 3 finds a teenage girl (Stefanie Scott) mourning the death of her mother. She’s made increasingly vulnerable by the vengeful spirit (Michael Reid MacKay) who breaks her legs, leaving her housebound with only a skeptical father (Dermot Mulroney) to help her. It takes him noticing the black paint footprints on the carpet before he believes something’s haunting. That’s when the psychics are called in. It’s a totally standard horror set-up, but nothing that couldn’t work if the old clichés were executed well. After all, its predecessors weren’t exactly reinventing the wheel and had much of the same creepy visions.

But you can feel a difference behind the camera this time, with the series’ screenwriter Leigh Whannell making his directorial debut. (James Wan, who helmed the first two, went off to make Furious 7, a better use of his time.) The images lack the same creepy snap, and they’re cut together in a way that really only communicates rudimentary horror concepts. At best, it repeats tricks we’ve seen in the other Insidious movies, silhouettes behind curtains, faces in the dark, that sort of thing. He certainly didn’t help matters by writing himself an awfully thin script, with half-developed stock characters and a limply formulaic story. (A few supporting characters even disappear, and not in a scary way, never to be mentioned again.) It has the feeling of a cheap direct-to-video sequel that has somehow escaped its disc and wound up in multiplexes.

Family Matters: AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY

In adapting his Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play August: Osage County to screenplay form, Tracy Letts, who has also adapted his Bug and Killer Joe into movies, trimmed the runtime by an hour but kept a great deal of its rich selection of meaty dialogues and monologues. The resulting film gathers a hugely talented ensemble and sets them before this all-you-can-act buffet and lets them chew. It’s theatrical, obviously finely written and overacted to the rafters. The story kicks off with the disappearance of the old patriarch of a large Oklahoman family. We glimpse him, played by Sam Shephard, in a brief introductory scene during which he reads us some T.S. Eliot in voice over. But now he’s gone, and his pill-popping cancer-patient wife (Meryl Streep) calls her grown daughters (Julia Roberts, Julianne Nicholson, and Juliette Lewis) home to wait and worry. Showing off its stagebound roots by trapping the ensemble in a stuffy house – you can almost feel the dusty stillness of the oppressive late-summer air – the film is eager to show us these great actors delivering great dialogue.

The screen is crowded with characters and none escape emotionally unscathed. Streep’s matriarch has cancer of the mouth and early on shouts that the pain has her feeling like he tongue is on fire. Hoo boy, is it ever. She spits unfiltered invective at everyone and everything, screwing up her face as if sucking on a lemon before the acid bubbles out of her, eating away at her family members. She feels neglected. She feels unappreciated. She feels abandoned. She’s shockingly mean and caustic under the mistaken belief that she’s simply telling the truth. You can feel sorry for her while completely understanding why two of her three daughters would want to move so far away. Roberts, who flies in with her husband (Ewan McGregor) and daughter (Abigail Breslin), is anxious and depressed. Lewis, the flightiest daughter, arrives with a stranger (Dermot Mulroney) she introduces, to her family’s surprise, as her fiancé. Nicholson, the most reserved and quietly dutiful of the daughters, has been helping her mother’s caretaker (Misty Upham), to what many characters assume is the detriment of her personal life. Streep’s sister (Margo Martindale), brother-in-law (Chris Cooper), and nephew (Benedict Cumberbatch) arrive as well, casserole in tow.

The centerpiece of the film is a lengthy disastrous dinner scene in which everyone gets to masticate over their lines with great delight as they start slow and build to a great roaring cacophony of spitting, wailing, teasing, lamenting, hollering, accusing, reminiscing, and snapping. In this scene, and many that approach its intensity of character and feeling, the acting is energetic, enthusiastic, and convincing in a beautifully theatrical way. It wouldn’t work if the ensemble was not so nicely balanced, some (Streep, Roberts, Martindale, Lewis) going so big, teeth tearing at every bit of scenery that crosses their paths, that others (Cooper, Nicholson, Breslin) can lean back and go low-key and small. There’s a sense of generosity, the actors pitching their performances at just the right levels to blend wonderfully without a sense that anyone is trying to out act their castmates. It’s gloriously hammy in the best sense of theatricality and the film is wise to step back and let them roar.

That’s precisely what the film is best at giving us: a talented ensemble chewing its way through delicious writing. It’s not much in the way of visually interesting, but that’s hardly an attempt on my part to pin the movie’s faults on staginess. On the contrary, I found the film’s theatrical roots to be better the more clearly and simply shown. This is only the second film from director John Wells, a longtime TV writer, director, and showrunner most famous for NBC’s E.R. and currently of Showtime’s Shameless. He shoots the film only functionally, with little personality. He stays out of the way of the crackling chaos in the familial war of words as old resentments erupt, spilling over into freshly growing fissure vents.

Even after slightly over two hours, there’s not much clarity in the geography of our surroundings or the house’s architecture. And the few attempts to open up past the proscenium – just a couple of car trips, really – seem too desperate an attempt to make it play at some imagined ideal of cinematic interpretation. Wells’s inexpressive direction dutifully captures the performances and allows for appreciation of Letts’s writing, but more imagination in the visual staging, and maybe even a better sense of claustrophobia by heightening the theatrical roots, would’ve brought the whole endeavor up to the same level as the material and the performances. He traffic-cops the cast capably, coaxing a fine-tuned sense of energy and a great underlying tension in the straining relationships. But in the end, I found myself appreciating the performances and the writing more than being moved by the whole.

Computer Stress: JOBS

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computers and the man partially responsible for ushering in the age of the personal computer and introducing the iPod and iPad to the world, was a fascinating and multifaceted man. Those looking to turn his life into a film would have many interesting entry points. Just look at the page count of Walter Isaacson’s great 2011 biography of the man. A film could follow the exploits of the garage-based startup and the decades of business strategy that caused Apple to rise, fall, and rise again. A film could concern itself with the technical revolution itself, spinning a story of improvements and inspirations as well as clashes with competitors. A film could explore the personal struggles and infamously prickly personality of Jobs, digging into what made him tick while striving to illuminate his creative process. And yet in Jobs business strategy is flatly presented, tech specs are vague at best, inspiration is only mystified, and his personal life is perfunctory. The first Steve Jobs biopic to hit theaters is in some ways the worst of all possible Steve Jobs biopics.

There’s a certain amount of irony in a film about a man obsessed with getting small details exactly right getting small details largely wrong. I’m not talking about the details in facts of his life and the history of Apple Computers (which are in both cases certainly bent to form a more movieish telling), but on a fundamental storytelling level. Instead of exhibiting curiosity in the characters in the story as people, director Joshua Michael Stern and screenwriter Matt Whiteley present them as objects in a diorama, made up and dressed up to look as close to the real people as possible, but with little effort put into creating convincing interior lives. It’s all surface to watch Ashton Kutcher play Jobs as an intelligent, mercurial presence. He may change his gait and speaking patterns convincingly, but he’s only the Jobs we know from his press events and public persona. To see Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak (Apple’s co-creator) is to see a convincing impersonation. The two men have fine chemistry – they’re often fun to watch – and are quite good, but bring in their performances emotional truths the movie itself seems uninterested in locating.

It is the worst kind of biopic: bland. Give me a hit piece, an energetic condensed version, or a high-spirited hagiography over cautious and flavorless any day. At least that film would have a point of view. Jobs plays as a series of reenactments, purely expositional and transactional. Events seem inevitable and preordained as characters – even ones played by welcome character actors like Dermot Mulroney, Matthew Modine, J.K. Simmons, and Lesley Ann Warren – speak to each other as if writing themselves into the history books. As Jobs moves from the garage to the boardroom – the main narrative thrust being what got him there, what lost him the position, and what got him back there – the film is singularly uninterested in figuring out anything beyond the broad facts of his life. Oblique references to his parents, both biological and adopted, are dropped, as well as vague nods towards his relationships and children. But at least the business throughline gives some kind of reason to downplay his personal life. That the ball is dropped there as well, with so much screen time saying so little, is strange. The ins and outs of Apple Computers remain fuzzy, as if the filmmakers were afraid too much technical detail would lose the audience.

No movie can sum up a man’s life, but it’s a waste of time for a biopic to not even try to sum up part of it. Jobs is content to simply say, “Here is Steve Jobs and some things that happened in his life.” It knows he’s important and assumes we think so, too. But no work has gone into making this a dramatically or cinematically interesting representation. Jobs coasts on the context the audience brings along, unwilling to provide any insight or interest of its own. I knew we were in trouble from the opening scene, a reenactment of the reveal of the iPod. In Jobs’s trademarks black shirt and blue jeans, Kutcher looks and sounds the part, sometimes uncannily so, as he paces back and forth, delivering the actual words of the event. When he reveals the device, the camera practically trembles as it moves in for a close-up of the logo, the onlookers applauding and the orchestra swelling. It’s a moment of ecstatic fervor whipped up to say nothing more than that the iPod is cool. The technique in this scene is repeated with the unveiling of the Apple II and the Macintosh. Aren’t they cool? Yes, they are. But couldn’t, and shouldn’t, the film say more than that?

Wild vs. Man: THE GREY

The Grey is an icily tense survival story about a plane full of Alaskan oil riggers that crash-lands in the middle of a wintry forest populated by some ferociously territorial wolves. It’s a grim story stripped down to its essential elements, with characters drawn in brisk, macho shorthand. At the center of it all is a man who we first see the night before takeoff shuffling around the camp. We learn that his job is to shoot wolves if they come near the other workers. But that’s not what he’s using his gun for this night. He places the barrel in his mouth and closes his eyes. He can’t go through with it. When the plane goes down, he’s the one with the gruff no-nonsense, clear-headed thinking. The small group that has survived the crash unknowingly put their lives in the hands of a suicidal man.

But who wouldn’t want to follow this man, so tall and gravely serious? He’s Liam Neeson, enjoying his career resurgence on the heels of successful action outings like the 2009 film Taken in which he punched his way through Paris to find his kidnapped daughter. His steely gaze and easy gravity are wholly convincing. Yet in The Grey, around a campfire one night, Neeson admonishes a fellow survivor (Frank Grillo) for his grating bravado, asking instead for a dropping of pretense and an embrace of some honest fear. “I’m scared,” Neeson says. That’s not exactly the Neeson we’re used to, the confident man of action. Here he doesn’t let his doubt show – he always seems to know exactly what they should attempt next – but his fear comes through with a cold, honest blast of survivalist pessimism.

Like Neeson subtly subverting his persona of recent years in this performance, writer-director Joe Carnahan sets out to subvert expectations with this film. His two most recent films were colorful and self-conscious efforts: Smokin’ Aces, a grungy, gory mock-Tarantino actioner, and The A-Team, a colorful 80’s action throwback. Those were films that were to a large extent knowingly goofy. The Grey is anything but. It’s knowingly serious with life-and-death stakes played grimly and downbeat. (It’s like Carnahan’s best film, 2002’s Narc in that way). It’s a destabilizing film that uses genre conventions only to slowly erode them out from underneath the characters.

The steady rock of a man at the center of the film is afraid, and so too are those around him. There is no comfort to be found here. The other men are at varying levels of acceptance of their situation. One (Dallas Roberts) wants to say some words for the deceased. Another (Joe Anderson) just wants to get another chance to find a nice girl. Yet another (Dermot Mulroney) slowly realizes he may not be made of the same survivalist stock as the others. And yet they all soon come face to face with their limitations. The forces of nature are coming to take them out far faster than hypothetical rescuers could come to take them to safety.

It all takes place in a convincingly dangerous setting, the starkly beautiful winter fields and forests covered in a pristine snow that is soon to be sullied by burns and blood. The soundtrack is filled with the sounds of whipping wind and howling plumes of stinging snow mixing with the puffing clouds of ice-cold breath, overlapping with shouted dialogue. The theater was nice and warm, but I felt a chill. Nature dominates the feel of the film, thwarting the characters at every turn. And there are, of course, those wolves. Neeson hypothesizes that the plane crashed into the middle of the wolves’ territory. The night air is filled with the sounds of howling wolves, their snarls drawing closer until the faint glow of their eyes reflected in the campfire proves to be too late a warning.

This is an aggressively downbeat film that moves forward with a deadly efficient sparseness. At times it fleetingly seemed to me to be nothing less than the filmmaking equivalent of Hemingway’s prose, so clean and uncomplicated, so interested in the ways man is defined, at least in part, by his relationship to the wilderness. This unexpectedly artful film is a shock of icy pop nihilism with a bunch of tough guys (defined in the film’s opening as marginalized members of society) reduced to sitting around contemplating death. No matter what they do, they just can’t seem to improve their situation. These men take plenty of actions in the film, planning and scheming and desperately trying to find new ways to escape wolf territory and find civilization, but the central feeling of a dangerous lack of progress, the creeping sense of the overwhelming inevitability of death, is potent.